Reading Readiness
Reading Readiness
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From Babbling to Books:
Building Pre-Reading Skills
From Babbling to Books:
Building Pre-Reading Skills
Young children who perform better than their peers in reading do so for several reasons, but one of the most overlooked is this — lots of family talk. Far too many young children come to school with poor oral language skills because they just don’t know enough words. The good news is that helping a young child is simple. By engaging kids in rich stories and having meaningful conversations with them, you— as a parent or a daycare provider or a preschool teacher — can help improve their oral language skills, which will eventually help them become better readers.
This 60-minute webcast, from the Reading Rockets website, stresses the importance of working with young children early to develop language and pre-reading skills. It will provide adults who work with young children with research-based strategies that can help lay the foundation for building strong readers.
Great Points From the video (Copied from the transcript)
Great Points From the video (Copied from the transcript)
JUST TALK! The more you talk to your infant and toddlers, the greater their vocabulary!
The more you talk, the higher the quality of what you say. Don't only use business talk, “stop that,” “get down from there,” “don’t do that”. Talk a lot; it will automatically be rich. It’ll be positive and rich because it’s not about business.
It is not just learning words, it’s the non-verbal social environment around talking that children are also learning. They’re learning about emotions. They’re learning how to be social beings by listening to you talk.
Children assign meaning to words through a process called fast mapping. And that is: that children hear a word in the context of an activity, or in the context of an object, or a person and they map meaning on to it. 'Doggie' may initially be any animal they see, but as they gain more experience with the world around them, they refine the definitions... this is a 'doggie', but that is a 'cow'.
Play is work when you’re a child, and so the more you learn through interactions and through the play and book-reading, you’re really learning about the world.
Reading with your children -the point really is the interaction — it’s not how well you read to your child, it’s not that you read the whole book. It’s that you have the interaction around the book- it’s a fun thing to do with your parents; it’s cuddle time with mom or dad; and reading becomes something that children want to do.
When you read to young children they also learn concepts of print (that those little markings are letters and words and that they have meaning), meaning from pictures and how to turn the page.
Children coming to school with a lot of words, with a lot world knowledge, with a lot of concepts have the building blocks upon which reading will be developed. And in the absence of those building blocks, the process us not impossible, but it’s a lot harder.
Early learning is important and that learning is not stressful for young children. They can play and have fun at the same time that they build this phenomenally strong foundation for school success.
Children of very talkative, socially interactive families have heard 35 million words addressed to them by the age of three. Children of taciturn (reserved or uncommunicative) families have heard less than 10 million words addressed to them.
This plays out in the child’s vocabulary size. So, by the age of three, children of very sociable, interactive families have a vocabulary of about 1100 words. Children of very taciturn families have only about a 500-word vocabulary.
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